Extra Christmas Tipping

At one time in the past, I never thought of extra Christmas tipping, but starting this year that has changed!

I started tipping when I realized that some of the most popular Christmas charities that pop up are for the classified poor, but an often ignored segment of the population is working middle class, and so I started thinking of ways to address this personally.  In particular, I’m talking about the friendly gas station attendant or your favorite waitress that always tries to make your visit great.  If they do their job well, these people can dramatically improve your mood and even your day in general.

So this December I decided to increase the tip I give to my favorite waitress by over 60% (the others get an increase too, but not by 60%)!  If you consider what I buy ($6 breakfast including taxes), I’m typically paying her a 83% tip based on my bill amount, not too bad huh!  Now I admit, I haven’t really done this in the past, but her service is so incredible across the board, that I have decided to tip her $5 for each visit that I go to the restaurant and I have her as my waitress!  Obviously when the bill is larger, I correspondingly tip more too.

How does someone merit such a large tip (especially at Christmas)?  Think this is uncalled for?  Let me tell my story that made me decide to start tipping this one waitress in particular at such a high level.

The Super Waitress’s Story and Why She Deserves a 83% Tip

First the setting, I’ve been going to an “in-town” restaurant for breakfast for over five years.  The cook is incredible and always make everybody’s breakfast perfectly even visit.  Five years ago when we started going there, we didn’t have enough money to consider extra tipping, but still left the typical 15 to 20%.  During that time, the super waitress was there too, but was young and while she was still good, she didn’t shine like she does today (perhaps she was shy back then?).

Over the past five years, I’ve noticed that she’s always polite and friendly with the customers, both her and the other waitresses in the restaurant.  It’s a great restaurant.  She’ll get coffee, extra plates and if she sees a problem, she’ll fix it promptly instead of going through the customer’s normal waitress even if she isn’t that particular customer’s waitress for that day.  There are a few others like her too, but they don’t quite shine like she does, and they are only about half as fast (literally).

Most of the year that I have gone there I only gave her 20% when I had her as a waitress, but now I give her 30% based on the one particular encounter that prevented me from having a horrible day!  Here is why I’ll always pay her 30% from now on!

My son and I were seated at a table where the waitress (let’s call her Gollum) was a troll.  We’ve had Gollum before and she has this attitude that we are serving her instead of us paying to have her serve us.  It’s almost like she feels like she’s entitled to have the money, and her serving us is a favor that she’s begrudgingly doing us.  So the last time she waited on us, She took our order and did get us our food (but it was a long wait and the food was cool).  Our favorite waitress notice that we were being neglected and started coming over and giving us coffee refills.  During that time from after our food arrived (cool), we didn’t see Gollum anymore until we left (I think she took a 30 minute smoke break).  I never had a waitress wait on my then leave for 30 minutes before, and so I was actually kind of worried something happened to her!  It was only when I saw her come in from that back that I realized that something wasn’t wrong with her.

In the mean time, the Super Waitress (I don’t even know her name really) noticed that the problems we were having fairly quickly and came to our rescue!  She got provided the following to make our experience good again… coffee refills, pop refills, napkins and the real clincher was the bill.  Yep, not only did she wait on use, but she also even realized that we were sitting around too long and went and fetched the bill.

Now based on the short conversation that I had with her, the other waitress didn’t actually ask her to fill in, she just figured it out on her own.  I wonder what Gollum thought she the Super Waitress asked for the bill for my table…

Anyway, after that event, she is now my favorite waitress and based on her incredible performance and demeanor at all the time, she now gets extra money from me for her services!

Do you give out extra for Christmas Tips too?

Merry Christmas,

not-Scrooge